The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — takes turns sizing up the new season. With Steve Ballmer running out of room and close to the warning track, we talk about who might be called up from the minors. The consensus is that Steve has 18 months to tur n things around. He’s a proud man, though, and may make the big move to Emeritus sooner than too late.

Dave Winer is back with a nifty pivot on Google Reader’s trip to the showers. The Gillmor Gang rode RSS and podcasting to the Big Show, and it’s good to see Dave going even further back to his outliner roots. More than anything, Winer made the hard stuff look easy and gave the tech generation a voice. Today it seems obvious, but Winer, with a little help from his friends, changed the way the game is played. Batter up.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dsearls, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Live chat stream

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yammer founder David Sacks just left the stage at the Launch conference in San Francisco, where he talked in general terms about his future at Microsoft. He also weighed in on some hot tech topics including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new ban on working from home.

As someone with a startup background (he was chief operating officer at PayPal, founded Geni.com, and is an active angel investor), you might expect that Sacks’ time at Yammer, now that it has been acquired by Microsoft. Or, as on-stage interviewer Jason Calacanis suggested, maybe Microsoft is hoping Sacks can help turn the company around and is grooming him for a bigger executive role.

Sacks basically denied both suggestions — he said that he’s still “really happy doing what I’m doing” (running Yammer within Microsoft) and that he’s “looking forward to doing that for a while.” As for whether he’s the next Steve Ballmer (in a good way), he said, “There’s a lot of people who have much more important jobs than I do at Microsoft.”

And you might expect Sacks to be against Yahoo’s new anti-work-from-home policy, since Yammer can help geographically distributed teams work together. However, Sacks said Yahoo’s move seems like “an easy decision,” since the company looked at the data and saw that people working form home weren’t logging in, so they couldn’t tell what those employees were doing.

“What is everyone complaining about?” Sacks asked.

Calacanis also asked about Sacks’ much-discussed Facebook post last year, where he said, “I think silicon valley as we know it may be coming to an end.” Sacks said today that what he had in mind was the fact that the big tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft — now have “so much surface area to their products that it’s easier for them than ever before to featurize you.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t compete at all, he added. Taking lessons from Yammer’s history, Sacks said that you want to start with an idea that’s not on a big company’s “near-term product roadmap.” After all, “When you first launch, your product is easy to copy.” For example, when Yammer launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008, a team of less than 15 people had been working on it for about nine months: “If a big company had moved quickly enough, they could have crushed us.” But that didn’t happen.

Then, after you launch and get a sense that you’re on to something, you want to deepen the product and add features as quickly as possible, so that copying you becomes much tougher. For example, Sacks argued that by the time Salesforce.com was advertising its own business social network Chatter on the Super Bowl several years later, the company was trying to compete with “Yammer 2008″, not what Yammer had become.

Plus, Sacks pointed to Marc Andreessen idea that “software is eating the world” — even though big companies are expanding into more and more industries, there are more also more industries that software startups can take on.

“I don’t want to seem pessimistic,” Sacks said. “I’m very optimistic about that.”

Speaking of Sacks’ role as an investor, he also announced that moving forward, he will be investing $50,000 in each of the top five startups at Launch, as chosen by Calacanis.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft announced today its financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2013, and it was an overall strong showing for the company.

The Redmond, Washington-based software giant posted revenue of $21.46 billion and net income of $6.38 billion, with earnings per share of 77 cents. That’s largely in line with what Wall Street had been expecting, though a bit lower on the revenue side and higher on the earnings side — ahead of today’s financial report, the analyst consensus was that Microsoft would post earnings of 75 cents a share on $21.53 billion in revenue.

Today’s results show a nice gain from Microsoft’s results for the first quarter of fiscal 2013, in which the company posted revenues of $16.01 billion and earnings per share of $0.53.

Here are the results in handy graph form, thanks to TechCrunch graphic designer and illustrator Bryce Durbin:

In a statement accompanying the release, Microsoft said that the past holiday season turned out to be the strongest in the company’s history. Additionally, CEO Steve Ballmer was characteristically bullish about the company’s recent performance and future prospects, especially in regards to Windows Phone 8 and the Surface tablet:

“Our big, bold ambition to reimagine Windows as well as launch Surface and Windows Phone 8 has sparked growing enthusiasm with our customers and unprecedented opportunity and creativity with our partners and developers. With new Windows devices, including Surface Pro, and the new Office on the horizon, we’ll continue to drive excitement for the Windows ecosystem and deliver our software through devices and services people love and businesses need.”

Microsoft’s stock price has been climbing over the past two days, apparently in anticipation of strong Q2 results. However, the stock has started to lag a bit in the aftermath of the earnings report: Microsoft’s share price was down 1.5 percent in after-hours trading within the first minutes of the report.

Breaking out the results in terms of company divisions, the Windows Division posted revenue of $5.88 billion, a 24 percent increase year-over-year; the Server & Tools business reported $5.19 billion of revenue, up nine percent year-over-year; the Microsoft Business Division posted $5.69 billion of revenue, a ten percent decrease year-over-year; the Online Services Division reported revenue of $869 million, up eleven percent year-over-year; and the Entertainment and Devices Division posted revenue of $3.77 billion, down eleven percent year-over-year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung’s Windows RT tablet, the Ativ Tab, will not be sold in the U.S. Mike Abary, head of Samsung’s PC and tablet business in the U.S., told CNET at CES that his company shelved the release because its retail partners do not see enough demand. (Abary did not specify if the Ativ Tab will be launched in non-U.S. markets).

The Ativ Tab is powered by Qualcomm chips, and the announcement comes, rather unfortunately, just days after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with an Ativ Tab on hand, joined Qualcomm Chief Executive Paul Jacobs during his CES keynote address to extol their partnership.

Abary also said that the amount of investment it would take to educate consumers about the benefits of Windows RT was another factor. As he told CNET:

There wasn’t really a very clear positioning of what Windows RT meant in the marketplace, what it stood for relative to Windows 8, that was being done in an effective manner to the consumer. When we did some tests and studies on how we could go to market with a Windows RT device, we determined there was a lot of heavy lifting we still needed to do to educate the customer on what Windows RT was. And that heavy lifting was going to require pretty heavy investment. When we added those two things up, the investments necessary to educate the consumer on the difference between RT and Windows 8, plus the modest feedback that we got regarding how successful could this be at retail from our retail partners, we decided maybe we ought to wait.

This is another step back for Windows RT, which is floundering in the face of competition from Windows 8 and Android tablets, and may be dealt a further blow once Intel Atom Bay Trail tablets are released later this year. Abary said, however, that Samsung may reconsider Windows RT devices if a strong enough market develops.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Making what he said was his first trip to the Consumer Electronics Show since he was a teenager, Salesforce.com co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff took the stage today to talk about the big shifts in the technology industry.

Benioff, who was interviewed by MediaLink’s Michael Kassan, noted that CES is traditionally a show for things like health tech, automotive tech, and other consumer tech — and on that front, you can find “awesome” products by walking its halls. It’s not, however, a show for information technology, so he asked, jokingly, “What am I even doing here? I don’t even know.”

Michael Lazerow, founder of Salesforce-acquired Buddy Media, offered some thoughts about that yesterday, and Benioff suggested one possibility today: It’s because all of these industries are converging. To illustrate that point, Benioff recalled meeting with Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda, who asked about the future of his company. In response, Benioff rattled off a long list of questions that Toyota should be asking itself, all involving the idea of connection: How are Toyota vehicles connecting with other devices? How is the company connecting with its customers? With its employees? With its dealers?

The way that brands are marketing themselves has to change, Benioff added. True, most brands now have a few employees “stalking” their customers on social media, looking for instances where they’re mentioned and replying, “Oh yeah, we love you, too.” But companies need to be more proactive. For example, he said that all the Internet-connected dishwashers and other smart devices at CES give brands the opportunity to send emails like, “We know that such-and-such is clogged” and offering to fix it. That’s the kind of outreach that prompts customers to rave on Facebook and Twitter about how much they love a brand.

Benioff closed off his speech with a paean to the virtues of disruption. Asked by Kassan how he looked at innovation versus disruption, Benioff declared, “We’re all in this industry because we love disruption.” In other jobs, people may need to do things like jump out of a plane in order to get excited, but in tech, we’re excited about “the constant and never-ending change”: “It’s what we live on, it’s what we thirst for.”

And you can see that at CES, he said — last year Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was a keynote speaker, whereas this year he was just “running on-stage and running off” at Qualcomm’s keynote. Benioff described the technology industry as a “continuum” where the old is continually replaced by the new. After all, in 10 years, all of the hot new gadgets at this year’s CES will be “in a landfill somewhere.”

“Who knows what’s coming next year at CES?” he said. “You can’t predict it.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Going into this year’s CES, Qualcomm had a hell of a problem on their hands — how would a company that planned to talk about mobile chipsets of all things make its big keynote one to remember? As it turns out, its answer was to make said keynote as equally hilarious and cringeworthy as possible.

Qualcomm was absolutely all over the place, and believe me, it was a sight to behold. It started off innocuously enough with three of the most obnoxious stereotypes that have ever graced a keynote stage. My favorite? This guy, the “gamer” who repeatedly got in his partners’ faces and loudly proclaimed his proclivity for pwning people.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, none other than Steve Ballmer took the stage and spoke passionately about all the Qualcomm chips that have found their way into Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 devices. Oh, and he made plenty of faces like this one:

Lest you think there was news to be found there — Qualcomm revamped its Snapdragon series mobile chipsets after all, and Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs was clearly enthused by the news:

Then shit got real. Then Big Bird showed up. Sure, it was under the auspices of talking about a new Vuforia-powered augmented reality app, but the image of a six-foot tall Muppet and a very smart man dressed as a “birdketeer” isn’t the sort of thing that’s easily driven from one’s mind. (Side note: I had a nightmare about that very scenario last night. Couldn’t sleep a wink.)

And then, for reasons passing comprehension, Archbishop Desmond Tutu (you know, one of the most prominent anti-apartheid activists South Africa has ever seen) greeted us all via pre-recorded video. Thanks, I guess!

Finally, just when it seemed like that hour-long roller coaster had finally come to an end, Adam Levine came out on stage to croon at a sea of writers, analysts, and vendors. Welcome to CES, ladies and gentlemen.

Now, you may be wondering why I wrote this in the first place. Regardless of how you feel about how the event played out (my personal reaction was to bury my face in my hands and mutter every so often), one of Qualcomm’s biggest quandaries is that it’s perceived as an “ingredient” brand — that is, its products are important components of other more notable ones. Sure, I’m the sort of person who religiously follows Snapdragon news, but the same can’t be said for the rest of the folks in attendance here.

Qualcomm’s big objective here was to make a big splash and prove itself as an interesting company worth keeping tabs on — its methods may have been, well, kooky, but there’s no question that Qualcomm opened a few eyes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Whether you’re a Microsoft user or not, you have to respect the fact that its install base for operating systems is massive. The company spans plenty of sectors, specifically enterprise, but of course in the home, too.

Today, the company announced that its latest operating system, Windows 8, has sold 60 million licenses.

Finding out how many of these licenses are consumer and how many have been sold in bulk to vendors and enterprises would be a good thing. We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment.

Here’s what the Windows blog team did say about the milestone:

At the 11th Annual J.P. Morgan Tech Forum at CES 2013 today, Windows Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer Tami Reller announced that Windows 8 has sold 60 million licenses to date. This represents the cumulative sales of Windows 8 including both upgrades and sales to OEMs for new devices. This is a similar sales trajectory that we saw with Windows 7.

We have seen a significant increase in the number of Windows 8 certified systems since general availability at the end of October. There are now more than 1,700 certified systems for Windows 8 and Windows RT.

In addition the news of how many licenses have been sold, the team says that Microsoft is seeing “strong growth” in the developers building on top of the platform. The number of available apps has been quadrupled since launch. Also, Microsoft says that it has passed the 100M app download mark.

Windows 8 has only been available for two months, so Microsoft sees this as solid growth. In October, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Windows 8 machines are “The best PCs ever” and that “The experience is truly magical.” I don’t know anything about that, but I will say that Microsoft has done a nice job of bringing all of its properties together in a unified look and feel, including Windows Phone and XBox.

UPDATE: We spoke to a Microsoft spokesperson and they told us “While we can’t share a specific breakdown, Windows 8 upgrades continue to outpace Windows 7 sales.”

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ousted from Microsoft, former Windows President Steve Sinofsky tweeted this morning that he is on his way to Harvard Business School to teach project management and collaboration, among other things.

First reported by The Next Web, Sinofosky said this on Twitter about his new gig at the Harvard Business School, as well as the writing that he plans to do, too:

Sinofsky will spend his time at Harvrd as an executive in residence, writing and teaching about product development, planning, collaboration, and more. He cited two papers he co-authored as examples of the writing he plans to do: “Microsoft Office: Finding the Suite Spot“ and “Learning from Projects: Note on Conducting a Postmortem Analysis.” Both were published in 1999.

Postmortem analysis? Kind of ironic I’d say in wake of his sudden departure from Microsoft where he had just completed the long, arduous journey of launching Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface. Soon after the Windows 8 launch, the news came from Redmond that he and CEO Steve Ballmer had agreed that it was time for Sinofsky to go.

The official reason Sinofsky left? Microsoft needed someone who could work across the multiple product groups, tie them together and create a more elastic set of services for the new age of business and the cloud. Julie Larson-Green won the engineering gig and Tami Reller took charge of the business side of Windows.

The unofficial (read: real) reason he left? he was a top-down autocrat who had an abrasive style not loved by the brass.

Now that makes me wonder what the hell this guy is going to teach a bunch of students getting their masters degrees. But I give credit to Sinofsky. Teaching is one of the greatest ways to give back to a community. I wish him well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — served up the Sinofsky firing as the main course of a dissection of the Microsoft playbook or lack of it. Who knew that it would be Steve Ballmer to announce just how screwed Microsoft is. Windows 8 solves the wrong problem, while Android keeps several steps ahead with its Nexus platform.

And the iPad Mini is like a flu shot, protecting Apple from the worst of Android’s disruption while giving the crossover market a BYOT device for the trip to and from the office. As Office attempts to treat each platform as peanut butter, eventually they’ll realize they’ve been jammed. The final firewall: PowerPoint.

@stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tonight, during Steve Ballmer’s interview by Reid Hoffman, the two talked about everything Microsoft. Now that Ballmer is talking about his competitors he let out a few bonzo words when it came to Google and Apple and the state of their phone ecosystems, especially when it comes to apps.

- On the Android ecosystem, Ballmer called it: “Wild”, “Uncontrolled”, and susceptible to malware.

- On the Apple ecosystem, Ballmer called it “High priced” and “Highly controlled.”

He truly believes that Microsoft can wedge itself in between the two to be successful with diversity and organization. As Ballmer describes Windows 8, Surface and Phone, he says that the products have been done right and the company is working very closely with developers, unlike his counterparts at Apple and Google. Sure, Ballmer has said these types of things before, but he’s losing his mind tonight in only the way he can.

The Windows Phone is actually really nice, and there’s definitely a market for them.

At one point he described Windows as “Wow, it just works!”, and words don’t really describe his excitement. In the next breath, he got a jab in at the “Maps debacle,” clearly pointing at Apple.

Regarding the cloud, Ballmer said, and I quote: “Woooooooow”. I honestly don’t even know how to spell what he said. He’s happy and I’m glad that Reid Hoffman is interviewing him. This sounds like sour grapes, but I honestly want to understand Microsoft’s strategy and what it stands for as a company. I just don’t get it.

I have to be completely honest though, when Steve Ballmer discusses enterprise and the consumerization of it, he is completely calm and sounds like he knows exactly what he’s talking about. This is what Steve Ballmer knows, and when it comes to consumer products, it just sounds like he’s trying too hard.

I wish he’d just be calm, cool and collected, talk about success and failure, and leave the crazy yelling out of it. And that’s coming from someone who loves crazy yelling. Basically, it went a little something like this:

Also, it was a cash bar tonight. I can’t wait to watch this show again next week.

In the words of Steve Ballmer this evening: “Yeah Baby!”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch